Research News Roundup – May 2017

Research Making the News

No need to punish poor or raise taxes to get people off welfare

By Chris Tomlinson| | 5.23.17

“The adult poverty rate in Texas could be slashed from 10 percent to 4.9 percent if women were paid the same as men, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The poverty rate among single Texas mothers would drop from 31.4 percent to 19.5 percent. ‘Persistent earnings inequality for working women translates into lower lifetime pay for women, less income for families and higher rates of poverty across the United States,’ researcher Jessica Milli concluded. ‘If women in the United States received equal pay with comparable men … the U.S. economy would have added $512.6 billion in wage and salary income.'”

New Study: Women Don’t Want to Get Married Just Because Men Make More Money

Amanda Marcotte | | 5.17.17

“…Women in larger numbers may have begun choosing single motherhood out of perceived economic necessity, believing that their male partners weren’t steady enough to marry. But although the idea of single motherhood has become more normalized, women haven’t necessarily been more eager to marry, even if men are starting to make better money.”

“When men and women finish school and start working, they’re paid pretty much equally. But a gender pay gap soon appears, and it grows significantly over the next two decades. So what changes? The answer can be found by looking at when the pay gap widens most sharply. It’s the late 20s to mid-30s, according to two new studies — in other words, when many women have children. Unmarried women without children continue to earn closer to what men do.”

Citing: The Dynamics of Gender Earnings Differentials: Evidence from Establishment Data by Erling Barth, Sari Pekkala Kerr, and Claudia Olivetti, National Bureau of Economic Research

“Black girls are more than twice as likely to be suspended from school as white girls – in every state – and it’s not because of more frequent or serious misbehavior. That’s one of the major findings included in a new report from the National Women’s Law Center, which examined a slate of issues that disproportionately impact girls of color. Its researchers placed the bulk of the blame on racist and sexist stereotypes that educators and school officials sometimes harbor about black girls, as well as a web of social circumstances, including their overrepresentation in schools with limited resources that hampers their access to experienced teachers and counselors.”

Citing: Stopping School Pushout for Girls of Color, by Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, Kayla Patrick, and Neena Chaudhry, National Women’s Law Center

New Research Reports

Most states require abortion facilities and other health care facilities to meet standards designed to ensure patient safety. However, some states have imposed specific standards for abortion providers that do little or nothing to improve safety, but significantly limit access to abortion. Those standards include measures that impose excessive physical plant requirements or require providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals; other restrictions ban the use of telemedicine for medication abortion and limit the provision of abortion to licensed physicians.

In 2015, 17 percent of all U.S. newlyweds had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, marking more than a fivefold increase since 1967, when 3% of newlyweds were intermarried, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia case ruled that marriage across racial lines was legal throughout the country. Until this ruling, interracial marriages were forbidden in many states. More broadly, one-in-ten married people in 2015 – not just those who recently married – had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. This translates into 11 million people who were intermarried.

This study exploits plausibly exogenous variation from the youngest sibling’s school eligibility to estimate the effects of parental work on the weight outcomes of older children. Data come from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth linked to the Child and Young Adult Supplement. The researchers first show that mothers’ work hours increase gradually as the age of the youngest child rises, whereas mothers’ spouses’ work hours exhibit a discontinuous jump at kindergarten eligibility. Leveraging these insights, they develop an instrumental variables model that shows that parents’ work hours lead to larger increases in children’s BMI z-scores and probabilities of being overweight and obese than those identified in previous studies. They find no evidence that the impacts of maternal and paternal work are different. Subsample analyses find that the effects are concentrated among advantaged households, as measured by an index involving education, race, and mother’s marital status.

The financial resilience of families is a critical factor in the overall health of the US economy. Americans across the income spectrum experience high levels of income and spending volatility, and health emergencies are among the most common economic hardships. One in six families makes an extraordinary medical payment in any given year. Families’ financial outcomes worsen as a result of the extraordinary medical payment and do not fully recover even a year after. This is especially true for women. The gender gap in financial outcomes widens after an extraordinary medical payment.

Women today play a central role in philanthropy, leading charitable giving within their families, using their time and skills to advance causes within their communities, and embodying the purpose and heart that underpin philanthropic goals. Women’s influence in and approach to giving has evolved over the last 40 years, reflecting the societal changes that have altered gender roles. While older women are entering retirement after decades of taking on expanding roles for women, including a greater say in household giving decisions, their daughters—the beneficiaries of greater opportunity—are using those expanded roles to help lead philanthropy in new directions. This report from Fidelity Charitable highlights this evolution in giving, spotlighting the differences between generations of women who give and further examining the similarities among all women, and how their philanthropic journeys are distinctive from men’s.

In the United States today, paid family leave is an elite benefit: 94 percent of low-income working people have no access to paid family leave. Millions of Americans don’t get even a single day of paid time for caregiving. One in four new moms in the U.S. is back at work just ten days after childbirth. While public discourse often focuses on income inequality, there is another critical way families experience inequality: the inability to be with their babies and families for the most important moments of their lives.